Problems With Vinagre

26 Jul 2008

So, the default remote desktop app in Ubuntu changed from, um, I don’t know what actually, to a new app called “Vinagre”.

You’d think that’d be something I wouldn’t give a patooty about. The first thing you notice is that it has a list on the side that lets you keep track of servers you connect to which seemed nice enough.

I didn’t use it much at first, so I thought nothing more about it.

Today, I started using it. Dear god:

Tried to connect to a fully up-to-date Fedora box (from a fully up-to-date Ubuntu). vino-server crashes on the Fedora machine. I don’t know who’s fault it is, but I don’t really care. Working around that by using XDMCP for the time being, but that’s pretty irritating, interface-wise.

While repeatedly trying to connect to the Fedora box (it silently fails on the Ubuntu machine), Vinagre doesn’t save the last-entered machine name, so I have to keep entering “192.168.0….” every time. Irritating.

Insanely hard to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to log into Windows machines. For same reason, Ctrl-Alt was chosen as the “Capture/Release” input. So, in order to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to login to a Windows box, you have to first focus the Viagre app (click/whatever), then make sure you’ve uncaptured the input by doing Ctrl-Alt, then finally, recapture the input by doing Ctrl-Alt again, and then without letting go of Ctrl-Alt, press Del to get the final combo. If you just push that combo of course, the Ctrl-Alt first removes capture, and then sends Ctrl-Alt-Del to the local machine. Not very intuitive, especially since there’s very little (no?) indication of whether input is captured.

Related, there seems to be absolutely no way to send F11 to the client machine. The general hotkey behaviour is irritating enough as it is: Alt-F4 closes either all of Vinagre, or an app on the client, depending on whether you’ve pressed Ctrl-Alt recently, with no indication of which “mode” you’re in). But, it seems that F11 is even worse. If you’re in captured mode, then most things seem to be sent to the target machien, but apparently F11 was deemed too important to be handled normally, and there’s no configuration mechanism. Fine, until I try to debug something and naturally hit F11 to “Step Into” a function.

Update When input is captured, there’s no way to scroll the virtual desktop if it’s bigger than your current monitor. WTF?

Basically, it just seems like this app was pushed out way too quick to the main/default user stream. Please give me back my old VNC/RDP viewer. :(